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Google(+), plus (+) Your World

Posted by Max Tatton-Brown on 10th January 2012

When we blogged last year about the importance of Google’s Emerald Sea project, a lot of what we were saying was hinting at the future integration of Google+ and it’s other properties.

Well today, things just took a giant leap forward with the launch of what Google calls “Search, plus Your World.” And it just goes to reinforce why you can’t write G+ off as a network that will dwindle into the background and be silently swept away.

Here are the main points to bear in mind from the announcement and how they effect us all and tech PR in particular:

PERSONAL RESULTS

From now on, there’s a toggle in Google – you either search the world and get general results on what everyone thinks, or you go for personal search and get results from your network. Which is more important?

The ramifications of this are huge, and to be fair, not just for Google+. The process we’re all used to executing a thousand times a day is now a choice; who do you trust more, Google’s algorithm or the views of people you have relationships with in the circle you trust?

PROFILES IN SEARCH

Your Google+ profile is now not only the best way to link to all your profiles on the web, establish yourself as a thought leader across sites and share content as granularly as possible – it’s now likely to be the first thing people find when they search for you.

Because it’s so intimately linked to the content you’ve created, your existence as an author just became a serious benefit too – as long as you’re curating your identity properly there.

PEOPLE AND PAGES

Essentially, this means the integration of Google+ search in Google Search. If someone talks a lot about music or say… enterprise virtualisation, they’re more likely to show up in search results for that topic. How this affects the likes of Klout who want to trade on this knowledge across multiple networks will be interesting to observe.

But again, while these changes are tremendous, the bigger theme here is just how serious Google now is about integrating social across its business. It didn’t just launch a social network with Google+, it launched the initiative to take the whole company to a new and integrated milestone.

Stay tuned for more changes like this that fundamentally change the most common experience on the internet…

Max Tatton-Brown